2018, The Year Of The Podcast

Podcasting has become a real force on thousands of websites. Like most producer’s, I was always an early adapter. I wanted to see how I could use podcasting as a marketing and branding tool back in 2005, so I launched a podcast called “What’s Out Next!”

I’ve placed a sample of the show here, and beneath the show, I’ve put some articles and resources to help you along your podcasting path.

To show you how much Podcasting has grown, check out this article with the link:

When Serial hit the digital airwaves in October 2014, the podcast world was taken by a storm. Suddenly, people who had previously been oblivious to the niche world of on-demand audio content were frantically awaiting the next installment of the weekly show that delved into the minutia of an 15-year-old crime.

As a result, more and more people are turning to podcasts for everything from politics to comedy, while bloggers, authors and YouTubers are leveraging audio content as a way to expand their audience. But where technology and media trends may have evolved simultaneously in the past, the tools available to both podcasters and podcast listeners remain surprisingly stagnant, unable or unwilling to provide the resources necessary to sustain the growth of the medium.

Shifting perceptions

Across the UK we listen to an average of 26 hours of audio per week, but despite the move towards on-demand digital content in almost every other industry, three-quarters of our listening time is still traditional radio. Adam Martin is the chief content officer at Acast, a podcasting platform that launched in April 2014 and has quickly become one of the most popular apps for podcast listeners, particularly those on Android devices. Part of his role is to shift perceptions of podcasting away from the idea of the geeky white middle-aged man podcasting from their garage, but he finds the historic lack of streamlined technology is a barrier.

“Once you hook people on to podcasts, that’s it. I don’t know anyone who’s stopped listening to podcasts after they start, but the tech needs to be accessible,” said Martin. “Instead of expecting people to download apps and look things up, we want to go to where people already are. We use Facebook Instant Articles integration and a Twitter player to show people snippets of audio they’ll find interesting. We don’t want to corrall them into a walled garden and force them to listen through our app; we want to be a part of the social media channels they already frequent and serve up content to them there. You have to break down the barriers to access podcasts, remove the friction and go to where the people already are.”